Among other reasons, Dorset is famous for the 19th Century writer Thomas

Hardy, for its rich pre-Roman archaeology, and for the geology of the UNESCO
World Heritage Jurassic Coast. In fact, the Jurassic Coast begins in the west at
Exmouth in Devon where the rocks are of Triassic age, and it continues east to
Harry’s Rocks on the western edge of Poole Bay, Dorset, where the rocks are
Cretaceous in age. However, the Cretaceous Period ended 66 million years ago
and it witnessed the downfall of the dinosaurs and ammonites that so fascinate
adults and children alike, therefore the question is: what happened after that?

Our area of interest is where post-Cretaceous rocks underlie Dorset from

Purbeck in the west of the county, through Poole Harbour and on to
Bournemouth, Christchurch and a little further east into Hampshire.

After I made this presentation under lockdown to a Zoom audience of BNSS

members I was asked to forward some of the graphs to a few interested parties.
My conscience wouldn’t let me do this unless I provided a written explanation in
the hope that it would all make sense without my verbal narrative. However, the
more I delved into the subject matter of climate change, the less I seemed to
know. I confess that I am a novice on the topic, but that is not a disclaimer. I take
full responsibility for the content, and I hope that I have fairly credited all
references that I have used.

0
During the Late Cretaceous, global sea level was up to 160m higher than the present day
because there were no ice sheets over the polar regions. Southern England was covered
by a warm sea in which innumerable small coccolith shells rained down and were
deposited on the seabed and are now compacted and lithified into a limestone named
chalk that is up to 5,000ft thick (1,500m). But like the dinosaurs, the era of widespread
chalk deposition across Europe and elsewhere was coming to an end. The tectonic
breakup of the supercontinent of Gondwanaland that started in the Jurassic period
eventually caused a protracted phase of mountain-building that swept across the
collision suture and formed the Himalayas, Dinarides, Carpathians, Alps and Pyrenees as
the Indian Sub-Continent and then Africa collided with the opposing continental mass of
Eurasia. That is what happened after the Dinosaurs.

Though the British Isles lie far to the north of the Alps, the huge tectonic stresses that
prevailed along the collision suture reached southern England, but in a weakened state.
Along the Jurassic Coast the famous Lulworth Crumple is a prime example of the strain
caused as a result of the converging African and Eurasian plates, as is the subsurface
anticline that is home to the giant Wytch Farm oilfield beneath Poole Harbour. Tectonic
uplift, erosion and periods of non-deposition of sediments occurred across Dorset at
times during the Cainozoic. Consequently, the geological record is far from complete,
principally consisting of Palaeogene sediments and then a gap of more than 30 million
years until the Quaternary. This review is nothing more than a brief and selective flash
through the period after the dinosaurs. But first, context.

1
Rocks are the books that form a library of planetary history. In rocks we can
observe, describe and interpret various histories, whether this is about the
geochemical evolution of the planet, fossilized ecosystems, palaeoclimates or
the evolution of life on earth. But the library is missing many volumes because
the rock-record is far from complete.

Dorset’s own geological library after the Cretaceous is preserved in two volumes
of time, collectively covering less than half of the Cenozoic Era and less than one
per cent of Earth time. Despite gaps, the preserved record is interesting in itself,
as I hope this presentation will show.

2
Cenozoic means the era of new life, and specifically it is the era in which the
fossil record contains the story of the emergence and evolution of mammals that
are familiar to us today, including hominins of course.

3
A prominent ridge of folded rocks marks the southern boundary of the Cenozoic
Hampshire Basin across coastal Dorset and Hampshire. Known as the Portland-
Wight Monocline, the feature developed in Olio-Miocene times by
transpressional stress and oblique slip movement northwards on a steeply-
dipping fault or fault splay (see cross-section). To the north, the boundary of the
Hampshire Basin is an erosional edge.

The Hampshire and London basins were one contiguous depocentre until the
Oligo-Miocene, when Alpine events caused faulting and folding and created the
Weald-Artois Anticline. This structure exposes the chalk and was a land bridge
that extended to France.

4
Overlying the chalk, and exposed intermittently along the coastal area of Dorset
is a stratigraphic succession of rocks that dips at a low angle to the east from
Purbeck across Poole Bay to Hengistbury Head near Christchurch. It is comprised
of a succession of interbedded claystones and sandstones of late Palaeocene to
Eocene age, the claystones poorly exposed and the sandstones more prominent
such as along the splendid beach promenade from Sandbanks to Bournemouth
and Boscombe. Several highly informative and interesting accounts of the
geology written by Ian West can be found online.

As explained by the British Geological Survey (Bristow et al, 1991), the

Palaeogene sediments of the Hampshire Basin were laid down on a surface with
low elevation and low relief. For the most part, the area was covered by deltas,
estuaries and lagoons, such as is found in the present day Fly River delta in Papua
New Guinea. An interbedded succession of clays and sands no more than about
500m thick was deposited, but eastwards toward the centre of the basin, marine
sediments of latest Eocene and early Oligocene are preserved, known as the
Bembridge Limestone, Bembridge Marls and finally the Hampstead Formation.

West of Poole Harbour the Bracklesham Group is mined for the kaolinite-rich ball
clays that form the ingredient for finest ceramics made in the English potteries,
including the famous Poole Pottery that was established in 1873.

5
In the graphic above, the timescale reads from right (past) to left (present). It is
Figure 2b of a paper by Zachos et al (2008) plus my annotations, and shows that
the overall trend of global temperature during the past 50 million years has been
down. Temperatures were relatively cool during the past 33 million years, and
ice sheets eventually developed over both poles. However, when sediments
were being deposited in the Hampshire Basin, temperatures peaked at an
extreme event named the Palaeocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM). This
coincided with concentrations of CO2 in the atmosphere that were ten times the
present day figure, exceeding 4,000ppm CO2 by volume. It was hot, tropical and
semi-tropical even in polar regions, but the biosphere coped and new forms of
land animals evolved.

Though PETM was an event of significance, it must be seen as one little spike
during a much longer period of elevated global temperatures between 58Ma BP
and 44Ma BP.

6
The PETM lasted about 200,000 years, but it is important not to lose sight of the
fact that it occurred during a long warm period that lasted almost 14 million
years and that the peak of the warm period was as warm as the PETM. This was
a planetary-scale perturbation of the Earth’s carbon cycle, biosphere and climate.
Temperatures rose by up to 8OC in the oceans and 5OC on land (Dunkley-Jones et
al, 2013).

Though much studied, there is no absolute consensus as to the immediate,

underlying cause of the PETM because it occurred rapidly and in conjunction
with several other effects that either could have been related effects or primary
causes, or even secondary effects contributing to warming because of positive
feedback loops. A significant unknown is the redistribution, if any, of warm-
shallow and cold-deep ocean currents caused by changing runoff from land, or
the opening and closing of channels where ocean currents flow between
continents as they move passively around the planet on tectonic plates.

What is known, is observed in the shells of microfossils in sediment cored from

the oceans and documenting a change in the isotope ratios of oxygen and
carbon, which are proxies for temperature. A change or departure in an isotope
ratio from the international standard is named an excursion, and the shells show
a negative δ18O and a negative δ13C isotope excursion that began near the end of

7
the Palaeocene (see Kennett and Stott (1991) for an early reference). Organisms
preferentially take up light 12C not heavy 13C and therefore mass extinctions are often
marked by a negative δ13C anomaly because organic productivity was reduced and
plant-based carbon released.

Foraminifera are single-celled amoeboid protists. They take oxygen and carbon from
seawater in order to construct their shells of calcium carbonate (CaCO3), and
therefore changes in seawater isotope ratios are noticed in the shells. Shells formed
in cold waters have an larger proportion of heavy oxygen than shells formed in
warmer waters, where the difference is less notable.

However, methane has a very ‘light’ δ13C signature and it is thought that the release
(melting) of methane hydrates on the seabed was a major cause of the decrease in
seawater δ13C. Methane released from the seabed would rise and enter the
atmosphere and be oxidised as CO2 and water, thus adding to the level of GHG’s in
the atmosphere. This explanation for seawater fits better with the δ13C profile of
methane rather than CO2 (Dickens et al, 1995).

Releasing greenhouse gases into the air would result in a positive feedback loop and
increase temperature further. An additional effect of having a higher concentration of
CO2 in the atmosphere is that it causes the ‘acidification’ of the oceans and reduces
the amount of calcium carbonate that is available for building shells and corals.
Approximately 35 per cent of all species of deep sea foraminifera became extinct in
this period. Acidification also caused shells to dissolve and this prevented the
deposition of limestone on the seabed, so that cores through that geological period
recover mud.

Between 200-300 families of vertebrata existed during the Cretaceous, but this
number increased rapidly in the late Palaeocene and early Eocene to more than 600,
notably birds and mammals (Gingerich and Arbor, 2004). This period of very warm
temperatures saw the emergence of three major groups of mammals, lineages that
have representatives today. It is tempting to ascribe the proliferation as a
consequence of warmer temperatures, but exploitation of niches vacated by
dinosaurs also must have been a factor.

In my view there is only one logical candidate for the cause of the warm period and
attendant temperature spikes, and that is the huge outpouring of GHG’s and dust into
the atmosphere from the North Atlantic Igneous Province as well as the heating of
the ocean and release of methane due to the undersea formation of new basaltic
crust.

7
Truly awesome!

8
On land, mammal species typically became smaller during the warm period. A
detailed study of an early species of horse named Arenahippus found that it
became 14 per cent smaller during the PETM (Erikson, 2017).

Erikson thought that plants grow larger when CO2 rises and might become less
nutritious for the herbivores. An alternative possibility I prefer is that a larger
surface area to body mass cools more easily and better-adapts the animals to a
warming climate. And given that competition for food must have been intense
with all these new species, a smaller size means that less food intake would be
required to survive.

9
Fossils of freshwater and marine animals recovered from the Eocene of the
Hampshire Basin include representatives of sharks, rays and crocodiles that
confirm the existence of warm-water environments in the swamps, deltas and
oceans of the period. Notably, the Barton Beds are richly fossiliferous and well-
exposed on the Dorset-Hampshire border and have been beautifully illustrated
by Chapman (2004). A comprehensive account of mammals from the Middle to
Late Eocene of the Hampshire Basin can be found in Hooker (1986).

10
Substantial evidence of important fluvial activity in the Hampshire-London Basin is first
recorded in the Thanetian, the youngest stage of the Palaeocene. Both the proto-rivers
Solent and Thames and others were present at this time, and palaeocurrent evidence and
provenance indicators suggest drainage was towards the southeast. Mottled clays and
associated lignitic units are present, and sediments were deposited in floodplain sequences
with associated fining-upward channel fills and point-bar accumulations. Rivers had densely-
vegetated floodplains, and predominantly transported fine material, as well as coarser grains
during floods. Clay-clast breccias typify meandering river sediments of tropical regions.

London Clay deposition was brought to an end by a rapid expansion of fluvial delta complexes
towards the east in the late Ypresian–Lutetian (early Eocene).

11
In the Hampshire basin the London Clay is succeeded by the Bracklesham Group, the lower
part of which consists of an interbedded succession of claystone and sandstone named the
Poole Formation. Particularly in west Dorset around Wareham, the claystones are ball clays
quarried extensively for their high kaolinite content that makes them suitable for the finest
ceramics, including porcelain.

However, the quality is variable, as discovered by Lieutenant-Colonel William Waugh in the

mid-19th century. He bought Brownsea Island in Poole Harbour hoping to make a fortune
mining ball clay, and he built a huge pottery and brickworks on the southwest side, complete
with horse-drawn railway. Within a few years he had to flee abroad to escape debtors
because the quality of the clay was relatively poor and not suitable for ceramics.

In the upper part of the Bracklesham group, coarse, cross-bedded fluvial sands were
deposited in the western part of the basin around Wareham in Purbeck. These sands pass
laterally eastwards into silts and fine sands of estuarine and marine origin. The basal sands,
such as those exposed at Studland Bay, together with those of the Bournemouth cliffs,
Wareham and the Isle of Wight, characteristically occur in fining-upward cycles that pass
upwards into lignitic sands and fines rich in plant remains. These sequences are interpreted
as actively-meandering sand-bed rivers, but with affinities to those of sandy braided streams.

12
A more-detailed schematic of the palaeogeography around Bournemouth is
depicted above.

13
At this time, the climate was still tropical to sub-tropical, as reflected in the land flora
and because the sedimentary sequences show evidence of fluctuating, seasonally-
varied discharge that is consistent with the suspected tropical to subtropical climate
with dense, diverse tropical to sub-tropical vegetation.

Characteristically, the top of the Branksome Sand is a dark brown clay and palaeosol,
and there is a sharp lithological contract with the overlying Boscombe Sand, which is
a well-sorted sandstone that marks a marine transgression. Estuarine conditions were
established, as evidenced by the fossilised plant remains and the occurrence of
Meretrix, a bivalve known to inhabit brackish to marine water (Bristow et al, 1991).
Overlying the Branksome Sand is the Barton Clay, famous for its richly fossiliferous
beds. It is a bioturbated, glauconitic marine clay up to 60m thick.

At Hengistbury Head on the coast near Christchurch, the formation contains

ironstone nodules at four levels. These Iron Doggers were high quality, consisting of
up to 30 per cent iron, and were quarried for iron-making in the mid-19th century by a
local merchant who shipped the ore to Southampton for it to be taken to South
Wales for smelting. Over 1,000 tons a week were mined, but the activity was stopped
because of protests about erosion on the Head and disturbance to harbour
navigation (Cross, 1963).

14
Our story continues in the Quaternary Ice Age after a gap of more than 30
million years during which time no sediment is preserved, and perhaps none was
deposited in the Dorset area. An ice sheet formed over the North Pole and
temperate latitudes about 10 million years ago, and an ice sheet and glaciers
spread southwards from Scotland, the Lake District and Wales. The maximum
extent of ice did not quite reach Dorset, and therefore the area was a periglacial
landform with permafrost.

In Bristow et al (1991) there is a good summary of the Quaternary geology in the

Bournemouth area. One notable aspect is the presence of terraces along the
main river valleys, principally along the Stour and Avon. River terrace deposits
occur at fourteen different levels, ranging in height up to about 60m above the
present level of the river plain, and they document the many different energy
regimes of rivers caused by repeated changes in sea level during the ice age.
Flint-laden gravel dominates the deposits, and the pebbles are angular and range
in size up to about 5cm across. Intriguingly, hand axes of several cultural types
have been found in these deposits. In style, the majority of axes are typed to the
early to late Acheulean period. That places them in the Lower Palaeolithic and to
a period older than 125,000 years ago, and perhaps much older because
Acheulean stone tools originated in East Africa about 1.7 million years ago and
were used by early hominin ‘species.’

15
During the Pleistocene, Dorset was a low-lying area of permafrost. Near-surface
layers thawed and became waterlogged in the spring and moved slowly
downslope, a process known as solifluction. These deposits can be observed in
some coastal sections, and terraces and lobes of soliflucted material are
common on the sides of valleys in Dorset.

Cliffs were degraded by this action, causing large quantities of debris to

accumulate at their base. It seems likely that the cliffs of Jurassic Portland
Limestone near Swanage were subjected to freeze-thaw action in the
Pleistocene, and the large screes at their base probably originated at that time.
During interglacial periods, higher sea levels left raised beaches, two of which
are found near Weymouth. On the western side of Portland Bill, the raised beach
is approximately 50 feet above present sea level, and it caps the cliffs to the
north of Pulpit Rock. It has been dated as 210,000 years BP. On the eastern side
the raised beach is about 335 ft above sea level and is dated at about 125,000
years BP.

Of significance is the breaching of an ice-dammed lake in the southern North Sea

that perhaps occurred during the Eemian Interglacial (Gupta et al (2007), but
could have been much earlier. It was this event that likely created the deep
English Channel, and the scale of the megaflood is evident from the next slide.

16
A map of the English Channel seabed reveals a deep scar cut by a river flowing
out of the North Sea, and a smaller channel north of the Isle of Wight where the
Solent River flowed.

Gupta et al (2007) presented the bathymetric map of the central and northern
part of the English Channel derived from high resolution sonar data as evidence
that the breaching of an ice-dammed lake in the southern North Sea caused a
megaflood event and dramatic channeling of the seabed, a concept that was first
proposed by Smith (1985). Cambridge University has a good section on its North
West European Rivers webpages, and the schematic above shows the wider
palaeogeography of the river system during the last glacial maximum.

17
Rising sea levels at the end of the last glacial maximum had important
repercussions along the Dorset coast. The steep chalk ridge between Purbeck
and the Isle of Wight was still more or less continuous, but about 10,000 years
ago the rising sea had eroded softer rocks to the south and began to degrade the
ridge itself, breaking through the existing river-cut gaps in it and ultimately
completely eroding the softer rocks to the north to form what is now Poole Bay.
Water was able to flow into the lower courses of the Stour, Avon, Frome and
Piddle rivers and Poole Harbour, and Christchurch Harbour began to form.

18
A cross-channel French-English project named Living with a Changing Coast
(LICCO) generated the model above showing development stages of the
formation of Poole Bay and Harbour after the last glacial maximum. It shows the
breaching of the chalk barrier to form Poole Bay, the drowning of the Frome-
Piddle valley to form Poole Harbour, and the isolation of what is now the Isle of
Wight.

Poole Harbour is a ria, the term for a drowned river valley that remains open to
the sea, and it is one of the largest natural harbours in the world.

19
§ Considerable uplift of the Cretaceous Chalk and older sediments
§ NW-SE axis of folding of the Palaeocene and Eocene into syncline (Hampshire
Basin)

20
What happened to sea level following the end of the last glacial maximum?
Fortuitously, a report prepared for English Heritage has tabulated relative sea
level estimates made in Dorset for the period back to 20,000yrs before present
(Johns et al, 2015). In the graphic above I have plotted that data as blue dots
showing the sea level estimates. The data are superimposed on a global sea level
graph that is Figure 1 from Siddall et al (2003) and it shows a remarkable
similarity. In fact, the correlation is very high and testifies to the precision of the
Dorset data.

The Siddall et al (loc cit) data are a mix of the δ18O record from a core, with +/-
12m error bars, and the black symbols are coral reef data extending back to
20,000BP.

For comparison, the inset curve is taken from http://commons.wikimedia.org

and based on published information from around the world. Again, it is quite
similar to the curve for the Dorset-Hampshire area.

21
Sea level data are sparse for the Palaeolithic period in Dorset and there is a gap
where the Younger Dryas and Bølling–Allerød Interstadial occurred (slides 34-35
for explanation). Even so, it is clear that any Palaeolithic, Mesolithic and some
early Neolithic archaeological sites that were established near the sea, now will
be many metres under water and therefore much valuable information has been
‘lost.’

22
Post-glacial maximum sea level rise eventually isolated Great Britain from
mainland Europe, Ireland, the Isle of Man and the Hebridean islands. Doggerland
is the name given to the vast area of former land that is now beneath the North
Sea. Much has been written about Doggerland and it is the subject of ongoing
archaeological investigations in the UK, the Netherlands and Denmark in
particular.

Terrestrial mammalian fossils of late Pleistocene to Holocene age have been

recovered from the southern North Sea in great abundance (Kolfschoten and van
Essen, 2004). The faunal assemblage is surprising and worth outlining in full:
mammoth, horse, hippopotamus, bison, wolf, beaver, wild boar, red deer,
moose, auroch, spotted hyena, lion, sabre-toothed cat, brown bear, cave bear,
straight-tusk elephant, woolly rhinoceros, Irish elk, reindeer, roe deer, muskox.
This is a faunal assemblage that features giant herbivores that grazed on grassy
plains and were preyed upon by giant cats and hyena. The so-called Mammoth
Steppe extended more than half-way around the Northern Hemisphere from the
British Isles through Europe and Russia, and into Alaska as one vast area of
continuous land.

In the Dorset-Hampshire area, Momber (2004) has described the inundated

landscape of the western Solent (red arrow on inset above). Mesolithic

23
occupation sites between 6.5m and 11m below mean sea level have been discovered
by divers and geophysical survey data. Radiocarbon data recovered from oak timbers
and fossilised trees range from approximately 8,455yrs BP at the 11m deep site, to
6,380yrs BP at the 4m deep site. On present day land, at Hengistbury Head on the
east side of Poole Bay there is a Palaeolithic site on high ground where hunter-
gatherers left stone tools and animal bones as far back as 12,000 years BP, just about
the time when the climate was warming at the end of the Younger Dryas. Refer to
various works by Professor Nick Barton, for example Barton (2005).

23
So far, so good, but now comes the tricky part: climate change. An invaluable
proxy record of global climate is provided by the relative proportions of the two
common isotopes of oxygen contained in the skeletons of calcareous microfossils
recovered from deep ocean sediment cores. During glacial periods, seawater
becomes relatively enriched in the heavy isotope of oxygen (18O), and the marine
oxygen isotope stages thus established now provide a universal means of
dividing the Quaternary Period into stages.

The oxygen isotope record indicates that during the Early Quaternary, when
glaciers first developed in the Cumbrian Mountains of northern England, each of
the principal cold–warm cycles lasted about 41,000 years (Earth’s orbital
obliquity). But following a major change at about 780,000yrs BP there have been
seven longer, more rigorous glacial–interglacial cycles, although substantial ice
sheets appear to have grown in only three or four of them in the Northern
Hemisphere. Each of these glacial episodes lasted between 90,000 and
120,000yrs and was followed abruptly by an interglacial lasting 10,000–
15,000yrs.

The primary source of CO2 is outgassing from the Earth’s interior by geological
processes. However, this does not happen at regular intervals, and therefore a
different catalyst is required to explain what controlled the ice age cycles.

24
It is accepted science that the glacial-interglacial cycles of the Quaternary Ice Age
can be explained by variations in the Earth’s orbit and axis that cause variations
of up to 25 per cent in the amount of incoming solar radiation. These
Milankovitch Cycles include eccentricity of the Earth’s orbit (~100,000yr cycle),
obliquity of the Earth’s axis (~40,000yr cycle), and precession of the Earth’s axis
of rotation (~26,000yr cycle). Yes, we are wobbling through space like a
gyroscope that has yet to stabilize or just been knocked off-balance by a flying
object.

25
Looking at the record in more detail back to 350,000yrs BP shows that the warm
interglacial periods occurred every 5th cycle of solar radiation with a frequency of
approximately 100,000yrs +/- 10,000yrs. Temperature descended slowly but in
shorter cycles of warming-cooling. Of course, from this it is possible to imagine
that the Earth is on the cusp of descending into another ice age maximum.

26
Carbon dioxide, CO2, plays a vital role in the environment and certain geological
processes. Not only is it a greenhouse gas, but it is the source of carbon for
plants and it has an important role in the weathering of rocks and the pH of
seawater.

As depicted on the graphic, several feedbacks in the carbon cycle act to maintain
global temperatures:

§ Global temperature will rise if CO2 increases in the atmosphere due to

outgassing from geological processes (such as volcanic activity). Higher
temperature and CO2 levels lead to faster chemical weathering of rocks, which
takes excess CO2 from the atmosphere and cools the climate;

§ Mountain uplift makes more rock surface available for weathering, and will
draw down atmospheric CO2 and decrease global temperatures;

§ Lower temperatures due to lower solar radiation (e.g.) will reduce chemical
weathering, leaving more CO2 in the atmosphere, thereby increasing
temperatures.

Outgassing from the Earth’s interior is the primary source of additional carbon-

27
CO2 into the atmosphere and biosphere. Geological processes release carbon-CO2
from mid-ocean ridges where new crust is created, and from volcanoes. Some
remains in the atmosphere, some is dissolved in the oceans, some is held as biomass,
and some is stored in sedimentary rocks that get deposited and buried in the oceans.

CO2 dissolves in water to form a weak acid, carbonic acid, that dissociates into
hydrogen ions and bicarbonate ions and reacts with exposed rocks to cause
weathering. Products of weathering are carried to the sea by rivers and deposited,
thereby removing them from the carbon cycle for eons or indefinitely.

Working with this simple model, what are the possible catalysts that could cause a
rapid rise in global temperature, a rise such as the PETM (Slide 6) or the ice age
interglacials (Slide 24)?

1. Volcanic activity - definitely

2. Solar radiation - changes are too slow
3. Anthropogenic emission of CO2. - theoretically

However, the graphic shown above omits methane and non-carbon sources such as
other greenhouse gases, notably water vapour (Slide 40), which as with methane has
a much greater capability to change temperature than CO2. It also omits the effects of
extraterrestrial sources that could cause warming:

4. Anthropogenic emissions of CH4 (methane), SF6 and N2O

5. Melting of methane hydrates on the ocean floor
6. Methane from thawing of permafrost
7. Water vapour
8. Comet and meteorite impacts (gas and dust).

As we move forward in time through the Pleistocene and Holocene epochs in this
presentation, a question that is crucial to the climate change debate is: what could be
a catalyst for temperature change and what is a secondary response that also causes
a rise in temperature.

27
What came first: a major rise or fall of temperature, or a major rise or fall of
CO2?

Ice core evidence is that changes in temperature and CO2 are not always
synchronous, as I have highlighted with green and orange hoops. Although CO2
and temperature rise together at the start of a warm interglacial period, CO2
reduction lags behind the temperature drop into a cold glacial maximum.

Is it a reasonable theory to state that rising CO2 causes the rise in temperature,
but that temperature can fall when the high atmospheric CO2 levels that caused
the temperature rise are sustained? I don’t think so. The carbon cycle model is
that CO2 has a long residence time in the atmosphere and the ocean, so how
could temperatures drop quickly if CO2 caused the rise?

28
What came first: temperature change or CH4 change?

Evidence from the same Antarctic cores indicates that temperature and methane
abundance change simultaneously at major turning events (peaks and troughs),
but there are exceptions on some of the minor-period cycles. As CH4 is a much
more potent greenhouse gas than CO2 it is more likely to compound a
temperature increase caused by a solar radiation trigger. In addition to the
possibility that the melting of methane hydrates in the ocean is a factor in
climate change, Mears (2017) has suggested that thawing of permafrost in the
Northern Hemisphere is an important source of the methane that accompanies
rising temperatures.

29
Many have commented on the evidence that CO2 lags temperature in ice core
data from Antarctica. The continuous record of 400,000 years has been replotted
on a convenient scale for each 50,000 year period on website
joannenova.com.au. Shown above is the record from 250,000 to 200,000 years
ago. Obviously, I have chosen this one because it best illustrates the point, but
consider this: a theory fails if there are exceptions, and the plot above shows at
least six periods (a-f) in 50,000 years when temperature and CO2 changes were
not synchronized, meaning that another mechanism must be found to explain
why CO2 is not the trigger that initiates temperature change.

I have added green verticals to show points when temperature rises or falls, and
red verticals with arrows point to the corresponding change in CO2. The youngest
example (e) is most compelling because it highlights that CO2 was constant for
almost 5,000 years while temperature was declining (indicated by dashed lines).
Dispute that!

30
As revealed by measurements from the Vostok Ice Core from Antarctica, the four
warm interglacial periods prior to the current interglacial period experienced
temperatures as high as or higher than the present day. The warm peaks of the
four previous interglacial periods lasted from a few thousand years up to about
15,000yrs. At face value it would appear that the current warm interglacial
period is or was due to end and return the planet to an ice age maximum.

This is supported by a look at the detail on the next slide.

31
When data from Greenland ice cores are examined, it is clear that the
temperature of the current interglacial period has peaked and been in overall
decline for the past 8,000yrs. Rapid increases of between 2OC to 3OC are evident
during the decline, including the present day spike (red lines). The temperature
observed at Greenland has risen 3OC in the past 3000 years, but is still 2OC lower
than the Holocene maximum and there is no evidence that the overall
downward trend in temperature has stopped.

There is no doubt that greenhouse gases and other damage to the environment
produced by human activity could and probably are contributing to observed
rising temperatures of about 1.5OC in recent history. However, that is by no
means certain because: [a] temperature spikes of that magnitude occur
naturally, and; [b] temperature rise from human CO2 input might lag the rise in
CO2. In any event, with so many variables in play, it is doubtful that the human-
induced component can be isolated and quantified.

CO2, methane and other gases released by human activity have the potential to
cause temperature increases, and this will have positive as well as negative
effects on the biosphere. However, a particular issue is that the natural carbon
cycle will take several thousands of years to accommodate the changes humans
made, meaning that the legacy of our actions will last many generations.

32
Apologies for the complexity of this graphic, but the detail is important. Note
that the CO2 are from Antarctica because CO2 data are lacking for Greenland
during most of the current Interglacial Period. Where data do exist for both
regions, the Greenland CO2 level shows more variability than the corresponding
Antarctic levels, and can be higher by up to 20ppmv (Hannon, 2020).

It is clear that the level of atmospheric CO2 is not synchronous with changes in
temperature, and that CO2 seems to lag temperature changes (lower graph). CO2
was lowest when the temperature was highest and has been increasing ever
since the temperature has been declining, as if it is lagging temperature by
several thousands of years (or is an unrelated phenomenon) and therefore only a
response to temperature change.

That period from 8,000yrs BP to the early 18th Century was before the industrial
revolution and therefore a natural pattern unlikely to have been influenced much
at all by human activity. A 5OC drop in temperature is a huge decrease and
without the subsequent increase we might well have been heading for a disaster
much worse than a temperature rise: another Little Ice Age or a Big Ice Age. Can
you imagine the disaster that would befall countries especially in the Northern
Hemisphere if global temperature fell by a few degrees!

33
Using Greenland ice core data again, and looking at the smoothed temperature
curve (green) for when the Northern Hemisphere climbed out the the last glacial
maximum, it is clear that temperature changes can be very rapid indeed. A plus
and a minus change of 17OC in 1,600 to 1,700yrs occurred at the end of the last
glacial maximum. That is an average temperature change of 1OC in 100 years and
therefore comparable with the observed change in the 20th century, yet it was a
natural change without any human intervention. The rapid increase in
temperature that began at 16,000yrs BP was the natural end of the glacial
maximum, but the rapid cooling that led to the Younger Dryas period seems to
be a special event, as explained on the next slide.

A word on the Bølling–Allerød Interstadial. Records from the Gulf of Alaska show
a 3OC warming of the sea in a period of 90yrs at the beginning of the interstadial.
This far exceeds the rise of 1.2OC in ocean water temperatures during the past 90
years.

34
One theory about the Younger Dryas is that it was caused by a comet impact, a
theory that gained strength when a large crater was revealed 1km beneath the
Greenland ice sheet. The Hiawatha Crater is 31km in diameter and was
discovered by an airborne radar survey. Glaciofluvial sediment from a river
draining the crater contains shocked quartz and other impact-related grains
(Kjaer et al, 2018). Tentative age constraints point to a Pleistocene age. Above is
a graphic showing the radar image of the crater. Black triangles are locations
where a raised rim is observed.

Even if the Hiawatha Crater is a different age, there is a platinum anomaly in the
Greenland ice cores and elsewhere across the Northern Hemisphere that is
associated with the Younger Dryas and is consistent with a meteorite impact
somewhere in the Northern Hemisphere (see Moore et al, 2017). Dust and gases
from the impact could have blotted out the sun for months or years.

A small example from recorded history. In 44 BC, the year that Julius Caesar was
murdered, there were clouds of dust in the air and two years of drought, famine,
plague and riots followed in Egypt as stocks of grain became insufficient to feed
the population, threatening the reign of Cleopatra. The cause: volcanic dust
reduced evaporation from the Indian Ocean and less rain fell on the Ethiopian
highlands that feed the Blue Nile.

35
Returning to the temperature history of the Greenland Ice Sheet, to examine the
Holocene interstadial (warm period). The solid red lines I have added highlight
long periods of temperature increases of up to 2OC, and solid blue lines highlight
short periods of rapid falls in temperature.

There appears to be a repetition of cycles of between 1,600yrs and 1,900yrs, in

which peak temperatures are approximately 2OC above the present temperature.
Is the next temperature peak due in the year 2,700 AD?

However, that temperature pattern, if not the cycle time, breaks down in
historical antiquity, as highlighted by the dashed blue and dashed red lines after
the Roman Warm Period (when Britons were getting drunk on local wine rather
than mead!). Present day temperatures are lower than they have been for nearly
all of the Holocene Epoch, so it is curious why there is so much fuss about
anthropogenic warming of 1.5OC.

What needs to be pointed out is the event known as the Little Ice Age, that was
experienced in the 14th to 19th centuries (graphic above, RHS). It looks innocuous
on the temperature graph above, but the effects were substantial and at times
devastating, as explained on the next slide.

36
A cooling of up to 2OC in winter months occurred during the Little Ice Age that
affected Europe and North America. There were two phases: the initial phase in
the 14th century and a second phase that began in the 17th century and ended in
the mid-19th century. During the second phase, the Baltic Sea and European
rivers froze over, winters were bitterly cold, and conditions led to widespread
crop failure and famine.

Was the Little Ice Age ended by natural causes or can the end be attributed to
the burning of coal for the industrial revolution? If so, have we prevented the
climate from descending into another ice age maximum? Avid skiers would be
upset, for they have seen their precious slopes receding and becoming mushy
since 1856, and the trend seems to be continuing.

However, it has been pointed out that the Little Ice Age coincided with a long
period of relatively low sun spot activity, as shown above, and notably that the
coldest period coincided with the Maunder Minimum when solar activity was at
its lowest (Eddy, 1976), seemingly an indication that Milankovitch cycles were
still in operation into the early 1700s. A deep solar minimum began in 2019. At
the time of writing (15th May 2020) there have been no sunspots during 75 per
cent of 2020, making it the second consecutive year of a record-setting low
number of sunspots. Should we be worried?

37
Anthropogenic climate change is a fact in many local areas around the world where
humans have damaged the natural environment over hundreds or thousands of years.
Global climate change, however, is a different matter and impossible at present to
separate from natural climate change. To know where natural climate change was going
without human beings we should have left the planet several thousand years ago and
observed from a distance.

There is much that Homo sapiens sapiens could do to reduce their impact on the
biosphere, the most important and effective of which would be to introduce strict birth
control measures in every country, setting a limit of no more than one child per adult. As
this seems to be an unworkable measure, it means that Hom sap will have to experience
the consequences of climate change to which it has made a contribution, whatever that
turns out to be, while the population gets ever larger and leads to ever greater impact on
our poor planet. It is ecosystems and living organisms that need to be protected more
than humans.

Repairing the environment could do much to prepare humans for the future, by that I
mean closing coal-fired power stations, developing hydrogen fuel cell transportation,
commissioning new nuclear power stations, eliminating beef and lamb from our diet,
replanting mixed forests, making plastic bottles illegal, full economic sanctions against

38
countries where logging of tropical forests and jungles takes place, and so on. Fixating
on fossil fuels is not the full answer because the entire world depends on oil and gas
for energy, fuel, plastics, synthetic materials and so much more - and will do so for
many years to come. And what can replace cement, from which much of the world is
constructed but which contributes 10 per cent to global CO2 emissions?

Climate change is simplified in the public domain as warming, perhaps with a few
freak weather events thrown in. But climate is temperature, hours of sunshine,
humidity, atmospheric pressure, rainfall, wind and more, observed over a period of
not less than 30 years. And climate change can be brought about by volcanic activity,
meteorite impacts, plate tectonics, changes in solar radiation reaching the planet,
water vapour and rainfall, and probably a few more ways. Humanity must control
what it can, but there is no certainty that humanity will be better off.

A wild-ass guess is that 80 per cent of the world’s population want to progress to
developed world status, since many of them are living a lifestyle more appropriate for
the 17th or 18th century: dirty water, poor sanitation, inadequate education,
malnutrition, endemic malaria and tuberculosis and so on. About 1.2 billion people
still have no electricity. Development and GDP depend upon the availability of energy,
principally from coal, oil and natural gas. It is wholly unrealistic to expect the world to
stop using fossil fuels any time soon. Coal is the heaviest polluter of all the fossil
fuels. The UK has almost stopped burning coal and will close its four remaining power
stations by 2025. What guarantee is there that governments of the 87 other countries
currently burning coal will close the 2,420 coal-fired power stations that were in
operation in 2019?

I started this work as a few slides for a speaking engagement. In trying to make the
slides comprehensible and the story to flow seamlessly, I had to delve into the details
of climate change, a discipline about which I knew little. Perhaps I know more now,
but understand less. There are thousands upon thousands of articles, websites and
blogs about climate change in the future, now and in the past. I feel like I did when I
was doing research for a PhD, that there is so much conflicting information (not
necessarily evidence) and different interpretations of the subject matter that it would
be easy to throw in the towel and admit defeat that a logical, consistent and
evidence-based path cannot be identified in the fog. However, having now walked out
of the fog I know the following:

Palaeocene-Eocene
§ Global temperatures were many degrees higher than today, and global
temperatures have been in overall decline ever since.
§ Mammals on our family tree flourished and evolved when the climate was much
warmer than today and atmospheric CO2 was 10x higher.

38
§ Extensive volcanic and other igneous activity were the likely catalyst for the global
warming in the Palaeocene-Eocene period. Volancanic gases and dust polluted the
air, and molten basalt erupted on the seafloor and raised water temperature that
melted methane hydrates.
§ Typically, volcanic activity releases huge quantities of water vapour (78%), carbon
dioxide (12%) and sulphur dioxide (7%), plus other gas and dust – all capable of
causing an increase in atmospheric temperature, though water vapour and dust
are by far the most damaging.

Quaternary
§ Solar radiation reaching the Earth is partly a function of the Earth’s orbital
(Milankovitch) cycles, and these cycles were the catalyst for the Pleistocene ice age
cold-warm cycles during the past 2,500,000 years.
§ CO2 and methane levels varied in a similar but not identical pattern to air
temperature, proving that changes in greenhouse gases responded to the Earth’s
orbital cycles but were not the primary driver of them.
§ Warm, interglacial periods have occurred every 100,000 or so years and last for
10,000 to 15,000 years.
§ The Earth is currently in a warm interglacial period that began 16,000 years ago,
albeit interrupted by the short, Younger Dryas cold period likely linked to a comet
impact.
§ Ice core data reveal that air temperature peaked 8,000 years ago and had dropped
4-5OC by the early 18th century, perhaps indicating that a return to a full ice age
was in progress.
§ A 1OC drop from Roman times was enough to cause the Little Ice Age, which led to
untold human misery, at least in the Northern Hemisphere. The LIA was also likely
caused by a drop in solar radiation.
§ Air temperature dropped by 5OC while atmospheric CO2 increased by 30ppmv,
again showing that CO2 was not the trigger that initiated the change.
§ The Greenland temperature curve has several spikes when temperature rose 2-3OC
rapidly, not unlike the emerging pattern in recent decades that we are told is due
to CO2 emitted by human activity.
§ Ice core data reveal that air temperatures can decline or increase by 1OC/100 years
due to natural causes, therefore natural rise cannot be separated from the effects
of human activity.
§ Despite the rise of 1 to 1.5OC in the past 100 or so years, the temperature is still a
degree or so less than it was 8,000 years ago without human activity. Don’t Panic!
§ One popular theory is that the recent rise in global temperature of up to 1.5OC is
due to anthropogenic forcing caused by CO2 emissions. Though feasible, it is a
theory that cannot be tested or proven (at present) because natural changes in
temperature are variables that cannot be isolated from the data.
§ Greenhouse gases consist not only of CO2, but also CH4, SF6 and N2O, each of

38
 which currently is rising rapidly, so don’t focus only on CO2 emissions.
§ Methane released by thawing of permafrost, and melting of methane hydrates is
far more toxic than an equivalent volume of CO2 and there is more than enough
locked up in methane hydrates and the permafrost to cause a substantial
temperature rise.
§ Rising temperatures lead to higher evaporation from oceans and land, and the
additional water vapour generated has a much bigger effect on air temperature
than CO2. But surely, warm and wet is better than cold and dry for life on Earth?

Science is a never-ending quest for the truth via a detailed understanding of the
natural world. Belief without proof is religion, not science.

38
These and other fascinating statistics can be found in the most recent survey of
international climate scientists conducted by Bray and von Storch (2016). Scientists from
53 countries participated, many with a single respondent or two respondents, such as
Burkina Faso, Nigeria, Ivory Coast, Uganda, Nepal, Serbia. But the geographic
representation and sample size look credible, though we have no idea what climate
scientists in the other 147 countries think, if indeed they have any such scientists. Call
me a sceptic, but over 90 per cent of respondents were employed in academia or
publicly funded research and therefore their job security is linked to the work they
publish with other peoples money!

The problem here is not knowing what percentage of climate change is or will be
caused by human activity, and where natural climate change would take us if we
stopped pumping CO2 and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. It seems that
many people are unaware that the climate is changing all the time because of natural
causes, so the public discussion becomes falsely bipolar, that is: either to stop (all)
climate change or destroy ourselves and the planet! Anthropogenic forcing is
indisputable, but nobody really understands where it is taking us. To what extent it will
affect humans and the biosphere in positive and negative ways is definitely unknown,
unforecastable in any meaningful way and requires a lot more observation,
measurement and good science to reduce the uncertainty and the risk. Closing down
debate is non-scientific and dogmatism surely will lead and already has led to
overreaction.

39
Air cools by rising into the atmosphere or moving toward the poles, and
moisture begins to condense and fall as precipitation. At first, the rain contains a
higher ratio of heavy oxygen (18O), because those molecules condense more
easily than water vapor containing light oxygen (16O). The remaining moisture in
the air becomes depleted of 18O as the air continues to move poleward into
colder regions. As the moisture reaches the upper latitudes, the falling rain or
snow is made up of more and more water molecules containing 16O.

Seawater rich in 18O. During ice ages, cooler temperatures extend toward the
equator, so the water vapor is enriched in 18O and rains out of the atmosphere at
even lower latitudes than it does under milder conditions. The water vapor
enriched in 16O moves toward the poles, eventually condenses, and falls onto the
ice sheets where it stays. The water remaining in the ocean develops increasingly
higher concentration of 18O compared with the universal standard, and the ice
develops a higher concentration of 16O. Thus, high concentrations of 18O in
seawater indicate that 16O was trapped in the ice sheets. The exact oxygen ratios
can show how much ice covered the Earth.

Seawater rich in 16O. Conversely, as temperatures rise, ice sheets melt, and
freshwater runs into the sea. Melting returns 16O to the water, and reduces the
salinity of the sea. Concentrations of 16O higher than standard in seawater

40
indicate that global temperatures have warmed, resulting in less global ice cover and
less saline waters. Because water vapor containing 18O condenses and falls as rain
before water vapor containing 16O, higher-than-standard local concentrations of 16O
indicate that the watersheds draining into the sea in that region experienced heavy
rains, producing more diluted waters. Lower levels of 18O are associated with fresher
water, which on a global scale indicates warmer temperatures and melting, and on a
local scale indicates heavier rainfall.

40
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